Business
An aspiring autocrat wins over wealthy owners by naming their deepest fear, a mass of unemployed workers rising up in revolt. Owners who disliked his manners still backed his hostility to socialism, organised labour and democracy, because it protected their position.
Once a state writes discrimination into law, businesses can turn it straight into profit. Firms belonging to the persecuted group were taken over for a fraction of their worth. Most businessmen moved quickly and eagerly to seize them.
A regime's fall does not wipe the slate clean. The men who profited mostly kept their companies and passed them on, and former regime loyalists soon returned to key posts in the state. Fortunes built under the dictatorship carried straight on into the new democracy.
Families who inherit tainted fortunes tend to say forced labour was a wartime necessity or that the workers were treated well. Or they fund something harmless, such as a prize for 'good business leadership', to make the controversy go away. The gesture works: attention fades while the full history stays unexamined.
Most business leaders did not need to share a regime's ideology to serve it; they looked down on the dictator at first and only took him seriously once he held power. What pulled them in was profit, not conviction. They were calculating opportunists who grew their empires at any cost.
When a state starts spending heavily on weapons, firms compete for the contracts by flattering and cultivating the people in charge. A firm's success then depends less on markets than on its closeness to the regime. Firms built on access in this way get pulled deeper into the regime's project.
Under such a regime, using enslaved and forced workers becomes standard business practice, and few owners object even when the workers suffer terribly. Because it is broadly accepted, nobody has to make an individual moral choice. Production and sales went on as normal right up until defeat.
Victors who need a stable, friendly ally have reasons to go easy on the defeated country's industrial elite. Cleansing people of their past became cheap and quick, and that political calculation let tycoons avoid answering for their crimes. As one put it, he was cleared 'free of charge.'
The richest industrial families stay out of sight, rarely give interviews and are publicly admired. That mix of invisibility and respect gives them great power and puts them effectively beyond accountability. It also lets the profits of past crimes keep flowing into today's economy.
As living memory of a dictatorship fades and its profiteers are never fully confronted, a bolder reactionary right gains ground. It begins tearing down the ideals built in reaction to that past. A reckoning that never happened leaves those ideals open to attack.